BES Playbook

2.2 UX Disciplines & Project Roles

In one sense, all participants in the software development lifecycle play a critical role in ensuring the quality of a digital product’s user experience. Everyone from developers to program managers to visual designers and content creators must take into account how their decisions might affect the experience of the system’s users.

But for those who specialize in user experience, the core disciplines that comprise their skillset might be summarized as follows:

  • User Research: A truly user-centered design cannot be delivered without first assembling a sufficient body of research on the system’s target users. This research can consist of quantitative data such as analytics, or qualitative insights gained from observing or interviewing current or potential users.
  • Experience Strategy: Once the users’ needs, expectations and challenges are well understood, those insights must then be synthesized and reconciled with the goals of the organization sponsoring the experience. This means ensuring that the value the organization is looking to provide aligns with the value the system’s users seek. Once the core values driving the experience are established, those can then be used as the foundation for determining what kinds of content and features should be incorporated and how they should be prioritized, then translated into strategically-driven product roadmaps and other plans that lay a clear path to realizing value for both the users of a system and the organization that sponsored its creation.
  • Information Architecture: This discipline entails organizing information within an experience in a way that is meaningful and intuitive to users. Prior to beginning screen designs, UX practitioners spend time considering the structure of the experience and the relationships between different types of content within it. They consider where features and content should fall within that structure in order to meet users’ needs. This typically results in maps of the system’s architecture and key processes within it, and often extends to content strategy documentation that outlines what content can be reused or refined versus what needs to be newly created.
  • Interaction Design: Once user research, experience strategy and information architecture (IA) have been established, UX practitioners can then begin designing screens within the experience to align with established needs and goals. Content and features are incorporated into user interfaces (UI) that align with the target devices through which an experience will be accessed. At this point, the presentation and behavior of all interactive elements such as buttons, controls, transitions and animations are defined and documented in detail to prepare for technical implementation of the system.

2.2.1 Planning User Experience Teams

While personnel from all disciplines share some level of responsibility for delivering products that meet user needs, at least one User Experience specialist should be incorporated within each software development team. This ensures that end users have clear and consistent advocacy within the software development lifecycle, uninhibited by conflicting objectives that may be held by developers, visual designers, program managers and others that may be involved in project delivery. The balance of these roles helps to ensure that each one’s objectives become transparent in the planning and execution of the design, yielding better communication and decision-making overall.

Specializations do exist for each of the separate core disciplines outlined above, however many User Experience professionals carry a sufficient balance of these skills to effectively manage all of them at once. A strong User Experience practitioner will be skilled in user research methods, navigation structure and process analysis in addition to interaction design. The more senior-level practitioners will be proficient in product strategy and planning, and should be involved by Program Management teams at the earliest stages of a project’s conception to ensure the right research, design and testing approach through all stages of the project. Enlisting strong UX generalists rather than specialized research and design functions is generally more cost-effective, and will help to maintain a cohesive product vision while ensuring a high degree of consistency, adaptability and agility within a dynamic project environment.

While User Experience practitioners do establish the foundations for interface design, the craft of creating pixel-perfect page layouts are often managed by a separate Visual Design function who holds a much deeper understanding of factors such as color, typography and creative asset production. Some practitioners may have both skillsets, but considering these as separate functions will increase the likelihood of identifying talent that holds sufficient depth of experience, skill and perspective for each role. Similarly, while User Experience practitioners should be competent in prototyping and understanding the implications of technical factors identified by development teams, true front-end development skills should be considered a separate role within the project team.

References

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